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Mancala

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Games

   A foldable, wooden Mancala board
   Enlarge
   A foldable, wooden Mancala board

   Mancala is a family of board games played around the world, sometimes
   called sowing games or count and capture games, which comes from the
   general gameplay. The games of this family best known in the Western
   world are Oware, Kalah, Sungka and Omweso, and Bao. Mancala games play
   a role in many African and some Asian societies comparable to that of
   chess in the West.

Names

   Figure of people playing a mancala game
   Enlarge
   Figure of people playing a mancala game

   People unfamiliar with mancala games commonly assume there is a
   particular game with the name Mancala. This perception is helped by
   marketing which often fails to differentiate variations or gives names
   like "Ethiopian" or "Nigerian". Although these countries traditionally
   play the game, there exist several different ways of playing it even
   within those cultures. As such, these names are not wholly descriptive.
   Even names which are rightly associated with certain games, such as
   "Awari", are frequently lifted and applied to different games.

   In fact, the name mancala is the Arab name commonly given to some games
   of this type; the word comes from the Arabic word naqala (literally "to
   move"). This word is used at least in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, but is
   not consistently applied to any one game. In the Western world,
   "mancala" is often seen used as a generic name for the game "kalah".
   Research in English refers to "games in the mancala family" or "mancala
   games", rather than "mancala variants" which would imply there is one
   main mancala game on which the others are based.

   Adding to the confusion, widespread mancala games may go by different
   names in different regions, often with slight rules variations. Then,
   there are groups that give multiple games the same name; sometimes one
   is intended to be played by men, another by women. Historically,
   researchers have had difficulty separating the rules for games apart
   from strategic implications or favored setups, which has caused
   additional confusion over which games are distinct, or which names
   refer to the same game. Because of these considerations, and the fact
   that mancala games have reached the West from these multiple cultures,
   it is difficult to establish what names and rules, if any, are the
   "proper" ones.

   The names of individual games often come from the equipment used; for
   instance, bao is the Swahili word meaning "board".

   A variant called pallanguzhi is played in Tamil Nadu. The Yoruba people
   of West Africa call it "Ayo". In Ethiopia, where the game is thought to
   have originated, it is called "Gebeta" ( Ge'ez ገበጣ gebeṭā).

General gameplay

   Mancala games share a general gameplay sequence of picking up all seeds
   from a hole (the strategy), then sowing seeds one at a time from a
   hole, and capturing based on the state of board. This leads to the
   English phrase "Count and Capture" sometimes used to describe the
   gameplay. Although the details differ greatly, this general sequence
   applies to all games.

Equipment

   Wooden Mancala Board from West Africa
   Wooden Mancala Board from West Africa

   Equipment is typically a board, constructed of various materials, with
   a series of holes arranged in rows, usually two or four. Some games are
   more often played with holes dug in the earth, or carved in stone. The
   holes may be referred to as "depressions", "pits", or "houses".
   Sometimes, large holes on the ends of the board, called stores, are
   used for holding captured pieces. Playing pieces are seeds, beans,
   stones, or other small undifferentiated counters that are placed in and
   transferred about the holes during play. Nickernuts are one common
   example of pieces used. Board configurations vary among different games
   but also within variations of a given game; for example Endodoi is
   played on boards from 2 × 6 to 2 × 10.

   With a two-rank board, players usually are considered to control their
   respective sides of the board, although moves often are made into the
   opponent's side. With a four-rank board, players control an inner row
   and an outer row, and a player's seeds will remain in these closest two
   rows unless the opponent captures them.

   These games are good for getting children interacting and used to
   counting. Children can even be encouraged to make the game themselves
   as follows: Take two half dozen egg cartons, tear the tops off them
   both, and arrange them in a long line (lid, base, base, lid). You can
   staple or tape them together if you wish, and you can use pebbles or
   beads as seeds.

Object

   The object of mancala games is usually to capture more seeds than the
   opponent; sometimes, one seeks to leave the opponent with no legal move
   in order to win.

Sowing


                   3 to sow 1 0 2 4
                               Before sowing.

                   Now empty 1 to 2 0 to 1 2 to 3 Still 4
                     After sowing from the first hole.

   At the beginning of a player's turn, they select a hole with seeds that
   will be sown around the board. This selection is often limited to holes
   on the current player's side of the board, as well as holes with a
   certain minimum number of seeds.

   In a process known as sowing, all the seeds from a hole are dropped
   one-by-one into subsequent holes in a motion wrapping around the board.
   Sowing is an apt name for this activity, since not only are many games
   traditionally played with seeds, but placing seeds one at a time in
   different holes reflects the physical act of sowing. If the sowing
   action stops after dropping the last seed, the game is considered a
   single lap game.

   Multiple laps or relay sowing is a frequent feature of mancala games,
   although not universal. When relay sowing, if the last seed during
   sowing lands in an occupied hole, all the contents of that hole,
   including the last sown seed, are immediately resown from the hole. The
   process usually continues until sowing ends in an empty hole.

   Many games from the Indian subcontinent use pussa-kanawa laps. These
   are like standard multilaps, but instead of continuing the movement
   with the contents of the last hole filled, a player continues with the
   next hole. A pussa-kanawa lap move will then end when a lap ends just
   prior to an empty hole.

Capturing

   Depending on the last hole sown in a lap, a player may capture seeds
   from the board. The exact requirements for capture, as well as what is
   done with captured seeds, vary considerably among games. Typically, a
   capture requires sowing to end in a hole with a certain number of
   seeds, or ending across the board from seeds in specific
   configurations.

   Another common way of capturing is to capture the contents of the holes
   that reach a certain number of seeds at any moment.

   Also, several games include the notion of capturing holes, and thus all
   seeds sown on a captured hole belong at the end of the game to the
   player who captured it.

History

   Ancient Gebeta (i.e. mancala) holes in the base of an Aksumite stele,
   Axum, Ethiopia.
   Enlarge
   Ancient Gebeta (i.e. mancala) holes in the base of an Aksumite stele,
   Axum, Ethiopia.

   The history of mancala is unclear. The first evidence of the game is
   the fragment of a pottery board and several rock cuts found in Aksumite
   Ethiopia in Matara (now in Eritrea) and Yeha (in Ethiopia), which are
   dated by archaeologists to between the 6th and 7th century AD; the game
   may have been mentioned in the 14th century Ge'ez text "Mysteries of
   Heaven and Earth." The similarity of some aspects of the game to
   agricultural activity and the absence of a need for specialized
   equipment present the intriguing possibility that it could date to the
   beginnings of civilization itself; however, there is little verifiable
   evidence that the game is older than about 1300 years. Some purported
   evidence comes from the Kurna temple graffiti in Egypt, as reported by
   Parker in 1909 and Murray in his "Board games other than chess".
   However, accurate dating of this graffiti seems to be unavailable, and
   what designs have been found by modern scholars generally resemble
   games common to the Roman world, rather than anything like Mancala.

   Although the games existed in pockets in Europe -- it is recorded as
   being played as early as the 17th century by merchants in England -- it
   has never gained much popularity in most regions, except in the Baltic
   area, where once it was a very popular game ("Bohnenspiel") and Bosnia,
   where it is called Ban-Ban and still played today. Mancala has also
   been found in Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece ("Mandoli", Cyclades) and in a
   remote castle in southern Germany (Schloss Weikersheim).

   The USA has a larger mancala playing population, although many of these
   players are descendants of enslaved Africans. A traditional mancala
   game called Warra was still played in Louisiana in the early 20th
   century. Perhaps the unfamiliarity with mancala games in the West is in
   part due to historic prejudice against primitives; the assumption being
   that these games could not require any serious mental skill. The 1961
   edition of Goren's Hoyle, which itself ascribes an Arab origin to the
   games, perhaps expresses a common sentiment upon discovery of the
   games' depth:

          The anthropologists have not undertaken to explain how it
          happens that the universal game of primitive peoples is one of
          pure intellectual skill. Mancala is wholly mathematical, akin to
          the game of drawing pebbles from a pile in an endeavor to win
          the last, but so complex as to remain a real contest.

Analysis

   Sowing games can be analyzed using combinatorial game theory: see Jeff
   Erickson's article "Sowing Games". Even on slow hardware, computer
   programs can easily defeat strong human players.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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